Oklahoma Comes to Grips With Gay Marriage

My high school coach's rallying cry is now unconstitutional

Marriage, Coach would say, is between a man and a woman. Anything else tarnishes the sanctity of that perfect and holy union.

He carried on like a victorious lawyer every time he delivered that line, which back in 2004, when Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, was quite often. I was a high school senior then, an average shooting guard on his team.

He had never said much on the subject before that point, but after, it became his go-to to fill gaps in conversations, or to steer them toward his liking. Sometimes, he'd tell players in groups, sometimes one-on-one. And sometimes, it seemed like he'd say it just to himself, a small-town basketball coach, potbellied with an Oklahoma accent, horseshoe mustache and a pinch of tobacco always tucked behind his cheek.

You knew he feared that one day, he'd see two men together, walking down the street, hand in hand, married, and it would be not just legal, but common – worse yet, normal.

It became an issue on our team, but no one spoke out against Coach, because doing so meant being different, probably gay, even if you were just being human. Some might have disagreed -- I know I did -- but anyone who did knew to keep their mouth shut.

Then one day after practice, when Coach started preaching again in the locker room, my younger brother, then a freshman guard, cut him off. 'Why is it such a big deal? They have rights! They're people too!" The room fell quiet as midnight.

Coach looked away, muttered something, then left. Several players glared at my brother, discarding him from us, casting him among the loathsome "them."

I was proud and jealous of his courage, but, as the tense moment hung there, I feared a fight, players swinging on him if only to reinforce their own heterosexuality. No one did, thankfully.

Later, I told my brother that he was right, that what he did was right, but that it wasn't worth it to tell the others that they were wrong. They'll never change, I said. It's not in them to change.

Oklahoma is filled with small towns like the one where I was raised, and here's the thing about small towns: their isolation insulates their beliefs. The way things are is the way they were and will probably always be, so long as the town hangs onto its boys so that they can one day run their father's farms, to its girls so that they can one day marry and give birth to a houseful of the town's future. It's the cycle that so many follow, because to leave is to be…different.

But in Oklahoma, the prevailing beliefs — the ones that extend from its small towns to its biggest cities — are driven by the church, as is expected in the Bible Belt. Generations have long believed that two men or two women cannot be joined in holy matrimony because there's nothing holy about that. They believe it to be sin, even if that's not exactly what the good book says. There's a homophobic layer stitched into the fabric of that belief, one that led to an effeminate grade school classmate being bullied so much that I worried he'd one day kill himself.

In Oklahoma, people cling to what's dearest, as there always seems to be a very real fear that anything they care about will be ripped from their arms. I respect that fear. Oklahoma is a place where the sky always threatens to unleash its most horrible monsters, like that EF5 tornado last May that churned at nearly 300 mph and was wider than Manhattan.

Despite a federal judge's ruling, those beliefs may live on. Oklahoma is, first and foremost, a place of survival. The United States government once considered it the most unlivable plot of land it had yet discovered, which is why they once banished the Native Americans there – mostly to die. It's hard to live there, weather notwithstanding. Much has changed, of course. I spent three days in Oklahoma City recently and was shocked at how much it has grown in recent years, thanks in large part to its flourishing NBA team, the Thunder. (A recent documentary described the impact as the "Thunder Boom," a fitting title.)

I moved away from Oklahoma one month after graduating from college there. I now live outside Boston, in the state that was the first in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. My younger brother, who left the state just as quickly, lives in Brooklyn, as progressive a neighborhood as there is in the country. To this day, we proudly call ourselves Oklahomans. It's forever home, even if our hearts break at how unwilling it is to accept change. I bet Coach is struggling with that this week. I imagine him muttering to himself, clinging tight to what's dearest and afraid.

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